For the second game in a row, Harden struggled to make shots, shooting 6 for 19 from the field and finishing with 18 points and five turnovers. This came after he shot 8 for 28 in Game 1.

Suddenly, the NBA’s fifth-leading scorer in the regular season (25.4 points per game) has become a major concern for the Rockets, who find themselves in a 2-0 series deficit after two home losses. When a reporter from a national organization asked him about his struggles, he got short.

“It’s basketball – making shots,” Harden said before moving onto the next question.

But when his media session in the Rockets opulent locker room ended, Harden went back at the reporter, asking if he had ever seen a player not play well before. The reporter answered that the struggle seemed unusual for Harden and was coming on a major stage, the playoffs.

The two went back and forth for a while, with Harden asking the reporter if he’d ever seen a basketball game before, then demanding to know whom the reporter was. The exchange got testy enough that team officials stepped in to usher Harden out.

As he left the room, Harden called the reporter “weirdo.”

The uncomfortable exchange speaks to the suddenly precarious position the Rockets find themselves in. After losing Game 1 in overtime after blowing an 11-point lead in the final four minutes, the Rockets spent two days saying they were still confident and believed they had let a game they should have won slip away.

It would be hard to say the same about Game 2 as the Blazers simply outplayed the Rockets. Houston remains unable to stop Portland forward LaMarcus Aldridge, who after scoring 46 points in Game 1, followed with a 43-point effort in Game 2.

The Rockets vowed to do a better job on Aldridge and used centers Dwight Howard and Omer Asik on him, but Aldridge simply took them outside and shot over the top of them.

“We took him out of the post, for the most part,” Rockets coach Kevin McHale said. “It was pick-and-pop. We tried doing some different things. We tried running at him a couple times. He just shot it a couple of times in the middle of us running at him.”

The game started in electric fashion for the Rockets as center Dwight Howard put on an amazing display in the first quarter, when he used a series of post moves to score 19 points and shoot 8 for 9 from the field. But Howard couldn’t sustain the scoring and finished with 32 points for the game.

“First quarter, Dwight was scoring, but we were giving up points as well,” Harden said. “We can’t give them up.”

By repeatedly posting Howard, the other Rockets simply stopped to watch. And by not being able to stop Portland, the Rockets could not play the way they like to.

“We just got to get stops, and when we get stops, we can get out and run,” Howard said.

The Rockets were one of the league’s top three-point shooting teams this season, and they did a lot of the three-point damage in transition. But they shot just 3 for 16 behind the arc Wednesday.

“We’re a transition team, we get out, everybody feels good, that’s when the threes come easily and some dunks come, but it’s tough if we’re not getting stops,” Harden said.

And now the Rockets have just one day to lick their wounds before playing Game 3 in Portland on Friday, in one of the toughest arenas in the NBA. A team that put two All-Stars, Harden and Howard, together with so much fanfare, producing so much hope that the city might finally have another title contender, finds itself on the cusp of a first-round ouster that could shake the franchise to the core.

“We don’t have our same flow, our same mojo that we had throughout the season,” Harden said. “We don’t have our same swag where we can just go out there and play and just have fun with it.”